1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a transport system and, more particularly, to a transport system for use in a large hospital for transporting articles, such as medical cards, in a desired manner between a card storage room, on the one hand, and doctor's offices, on the other.
2. Description of the Related Art
All information about a patient, such as the symptoms, the case history, and the like, is recorded in a medical card. The medical cards are very important, and are therefore treated in the same way as certificates. Medical cards are sheets of papers, on which doctors may write the information about their patients. In a large hospital having various departments, the medical cards are filed and stored in a storage room. When a patient visits the hospital to see the doctor, his or her card is sent from the storage room to the doctor's office. After the patient has received an examination or a treatment, or both, in the doctor's office, his or her card is carried back to the storage room by means of a lack wagon or the like.
Two methods are known for taking medical cards from the storage room. The first method is manual, and the second method is automatic. In the first method, the cards are manually taken from the lacks or drawers installed within the storage room. In the second method, they are automatically delivered from an automatic storage room (hereinafter referred to as "automatic card storage"). The automatic card storage is used in a large hospital which has many medical departments and where many patients stay and visit, in order to reduce the time for fetching desired medical cards for doctors. The medical cards supplied from the automatic card storage are manually classified in accordance with the medical departments concerned, and the cards thus classified are transported to the respective doctor's offices by persons or by means of linear-motor vehicles. Such vehicles are disclosed in West German Patent Publication No. DE-OS 37 16 353 (U.S. patent application Ser. No. 049,404). The use of the automatic card storage and the linear-motor vehicles reduces the time required for providing the doctors with the medical card they need.
As has been described, the medical cards automatically supplied from the automatic card storage must be manually classified so that they may be sent to the doctor's offices where they are needed. Obviously, the classification of the cards requires much labor and long time.